Title: Risk assessment in man and mouse.Abstract:
Subjects decided when to switch from one target to another as time elapsed
in a trial. Human subjects were asked to “catch” a target that appeared
either at Location A after a short duration (i.e. 2 seconds) or at Location
B after a longer. Mouse subjects harvested pellets whose release was
triggered either from interrupting an infrared beam in either the “short”
hopper or the “long” hopper. The trial type (short or long) was not
signaled; subjects relied on their sense of the time elapsed since trial
onset to decide when to switch. The relative frequency of the two types
varied between blocks. Choosing an appropriate target switch time requires
accurate assessment of the risk of premature departure from the short target
and late arrival at the long target. The risk has two components: intrinsic
(due to variability in the subject’s estimates of elapsed time) and
extrinsic (the relative frequency). Both human and mouse subjects track the
optimal switch point fairly closely. Thus, under these circumstances risk
assessment is accurate and decision-making optimal in both man and mouse.
The mouse results open up the possibility of a genetic approach to the
neural mechanisms of risk assessment.

Title: The evolved psychology
underlying culture acquisition: some tentative suggestionsAbstract:
Our species' ability to thrive in virtually every ecosystem on the face of
the planet is principally due to our capacity to acquire, exploit, and
further develop information that we obtain from other
people. Anthropologists have long pondered the question of the evolution of
what has been termed "the capacity for culture." However, until recently,
most attempts to address this issue have relied on informationally and
evolutionarily implausible generalized learning mechanisms. Evolutionary
psychologists have achieved considerable success in identifying
domain-specific mental mechanisms. However, with only a few exceptions, they
have largely overlooked the problem of culture acquisition. This talk
explores the emerging perspective that our species' use of culture depends
on the workings of an assortment of special-purpose psychological mechanisms
that evolved in order to exploit the enormous adaptive potential of socially
transmitted information.

Title: Baboon MetaphysicsAbstract: What can studies of nonhuman primates tell us about the
evolution of human cognition? Long-term research on baboons suggests that
natural selection has favored in baboons – and, by extension, other monkeys
and apes – a mind that is specialized for observing social life, computing
social relations, and predicting other animals’ behavior. This knowledge is
based on discrete-valued traits (identity, rank, kinship) that are combined
to create a representation of social relations that is hierarchically
structured, open-ended, and rule-governed, and that embodies a recognition
of other individuals’ motives and the causal relations that link one
individual’s actions with another’s. Long before the evolution of language,
the demands of social life created minds that were preadapted to evolve it.

Title: Perceiving persisting
objectsAbstract: Visual experience consists of more than discrete
snapshots of the world: we must bind individual views over time into a
coherent dynamic experience. Not only must we perceive discrete objects, but
we must see them as the *same*
objects through time, motion, featural change, and interruptions such as
occlusion. While a tremendous amount of research has explored static object
representations, surprisingly little has focused on the factors which
underlie the representation of persisting objects, beyond low-level motion
mechanisms. I will describe and demonstrate several projects from our
laboratory which explore three primary aspects of object persistence: (1)
Surprising demonstrations of failures of visual awareness (involving
'motion-induced blindness' and 'inattentional blindness'), highlighting the
extent to which we can completely fail to be consciously aware of salient
persisting objects in the first place; (2) Studies of visual tracking (using
psychophysics and fMRI) which begin to reveal the underlying 'rules' by
which the visual system determines when objects do and do not persist; and
(3) Studies of ambiguous motion displays (including examples of causal
perception) which reveal the additional rules that help to determine 'which
went where', in situations involving multiple moving objects. Each of these
research strands will involve perceptually salient demonstrations of various
types, with subject populations including adults, infants, and nonhuman
primates. Collectively, this work begins to reveal how the mind weaves
coherent persisting visual representations out of fragmented snapshots of
the world.

Title: Figuring out what we think and why: causal inference and
theory of mindAbstract: In the past ten years theory theorists have begun to make
the idea of theories and theory formation more precise. This research has
applied work in the philosophy of science and computer science on causal
graphical models or Bayes nets to cognitive development. Most of this work,
however, has concerned physical causality. I will present new work applying
these ideas to children's understanding of psychological causation,
including analyses of false belief, trait attribution and free will.

Title: Expert performance: from
action to perception to understandingAbstract: What makes a
highly skilled performer different from his or her novice counterpart? At
first glance, one might suggest that the answer is simple. It is the quality
of overt behavior that separates exceptional performers from those less
skilled. We can all point to many ‘real world’ examples of such performance
differences – just try comparing any professional athlete to his or her
recreational counterpart. Although actual performance is one component that
differentiates skilled individuals from novices, my research program
suggests that these overt performance distinctions are only part of the
picture. In this talk, I will present a series of studies exploring
differences in the attentional substrates and memory structures governing
novice and expert motor skill performance as it unfolds in real time. I will
also cover work exploring the role of motor experience in the representation
and understanding of skill-relevant information in situations where there is
no intention to act. Specifically, I will show that activities as diverse as
language comprehension, memory judgments, and preferences for objects/events
in one’s environment are modulated by one’s motor skill expertise. Together,
this work highlights differences in the cognitive and neural operations
supporting novice and skilled performance on the playing field and beyond.
Implications for learning, training, and performance breakdowns under stress
will be discussed.

Title: Language and (New) ThoughtAbstract:
Does language change thought? This classical question has recently received
renewed attention, as new lines of evidence have been offered, either
supporting or arguing against the idea that speaking a particular language
-- or having a language at all -- affects our non-linguistic organization.
The domain of space has provided particularly fertile territory for this
debate. In this talk, I will present a new hypothesis about the way in
which language interacts with spatial representations, arguing that this
occurs on a momentary basis, with no repercussions for permanent changes in
our spatial representation. This hypothesis not only accounts for new data
I will discuss; it also accounts for much of the existing data on both sides
of the aisle, in domains as different as spatial cognition and the
representation of color. Having a language undoubtedly changes human
cognition -- but it does not change human concepts.